


Death the Maiden

by camakitsune



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26818252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camakitsune/pseuds/camakitsune
Summary: Marluxia has a personal ghost.
Relationships: Marluxia & Spectre Nobody (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	Death the Maiden

Marluxia had lost something.

His heart – of course. His memory – definitely. Something else – he was sure of it. But what?

He wondered, because he could not trust anyone enough to ask if they had the same loss gnawing at the backs of their skulls. Nor could he bear to brush it aside. He wondered, because he cared what the answer was and he needed something to care about. Something steadier than the fleeting ghosts of interest in the endless barrage of tasks handed to him.

If brooding over what he had lost was to become the purpose binding the wisps of his being from scattering in the wind, so be it.

His brooding bore fruit.

On his first assumption, he figured someone entered his room while he was on a mission – to spy, to steal? – but neither reason explained the sheer white cloth on his floor unless the spy or thief was supremely incompetent.

As he approached it, he made out distinct sleeves and a hood. Small enough to fit a baby. When he lifted it, the sleeves reached forth to drape over his wrist, but it had no strength of its own to hold on when he let go of it. He had seen the lesser Nobodies change their shape before, but never into a hood.

He wondered if he was the only one who had something like this appear before him. He left it be.

Marluxia started a garden. It wasn’t much to start with. Simply a small pocket of abandoned land on a world in its early stages of death. But it had real dirt and a sun and having a hobby should be a step in the right direction if their goal was to regain their humanity.

If.

Preparing the land for a garden only pressed into his awareness the lack of any sense of accomplishment. This, too, he allowed to gnaw at the back of his skull.

The next time he disturbed the white cloth on his bedroom floor, he found it heavier, a little more present. A face had grown under the hood: smooth and featureless, more a mannequin’s suggestion of a face. But the now-child-sized robe was growing and changing and warranted his attention. He handled it more carefully this time. The face was the only solid part, but the sleeves still reached to hold on to his arm.

“What are you?” he asked.

He waited for the telepathic whisper of the lesser Nobodies, but none came. Perhaps it knew the answer as well he did (as poorly as he did) when he first came to.

“Can you speak?”

The mouthless mannequin-face remained dead silent. No matter. It may very well learn to speak in time. For the moment, he set her face-up on his desk and looked forward to hearing her respond to him.

He didn’t know why he stopped thinking of “it” and started thinking of “her.” He couldn’t afford to believe it was a coincidence. The reason had to be scattered somewhere with the memories he lost. So he let himself keep thinking of “her” to let his loss for an explanation remind him that something was lost.

Marluxia was granted a portion of Dusks to shape as he pleased. He granted them floral shapes to shift in and out of and called them Reapers. The hooded face in his room did not change shape in accord with his influence.

Was she truly even a Nobody? Or simply a ghost of the memories Marluxia could not reach, a figment of his own emptiness?

Another member joined the Organization. She was prickly as a cactus with a distaste for seemingly anything and Marluxia could tell that she, too, was skeptical at best of their leadership. He asked her once, after she had a few days to settle in, whether she noticed any odd activity from the lesser Nobodies. She flung the inquiry aside with a dismissive air, so he offered the extra information that one appeared in his room barely responsive and hadn’t yet tried to leave.

“Just destroy it if it’s weirding you out,” she offered. “It’s not like anyone would notice.”

A fair point, but not a solution he’d jump to quite yet. It was becoming harder and harder to question whether this strange face was unique to him. The possibility that Marluxia’s little ghost was purposely planted by a superior was not lost on him. But if so then by whom, and for what purpose?

Shortly after the specter’s face filled in with features – pupil-less eyes and small lips resting in an impassive expression – she began to stand on her own. Of course, she “stood” only in a loose sense of the word: still only a hooded face, she floated hip-height to Marluxia, the hem of her heavy white robe hovering just above the floor.

When Marluxia returned from a mission and found her upright on her own, a warmth flickered over his chest, transient as a butterfly’s wingbeat passing him by for another flower. It slipped away before he could even think to grab it. Without it, he was merely standing in his room with a silent disembodied face that had been intruding for months now.

“Can you speak now?” he asked her.

If he didn’t already know better, she could have passed for a decoration, just as still as any other inexplicably floating fixture in this castle. But she was not a decoration, and Marluxia still had no more clues as to what she was. “Why did you appear to me?” Firmer this time.

He almost didn’t catch it when she answered. Her voice was a feeble sound: withered flowers tumbling to the earth, long dead and long forgotten.

It didn’t answer his question, but it was an answer finally. The butterfly passed by once more.

A Keyblade wielder joined their ranks. It flew in the face of everything he had been told. If the Keyblade required a heart to be wielded, then what did that say about their newest member? About the entire lot of them squirming in Xemnas’ grip?

But if their missing hearts had been a lie, then what of the gaping voids where his memories and emotions should have been? Something wasn’t adding up.

Marluxia knew the Keyblade would be instrumental to ousting Xemnas and spearheading his own search for truth. He just needed a way to take hold of what was right in front of him. One thing was certain – he needed to move, lest he spend the rest of his days a puppet strung up with lies. He was still missing something dear to him, if only he could remember what it was. Wasn’t he?

As he searched for a path to bring the Keyblade under his control, the longing meant to spur him forward stopped gnawing at the back of his skull. He lost that sense of loss, and the specter stopped growing.

He couldn’t afford to believe it was a coincidence.

“You feed on me,” he accused her, staring past her through the window. Perhaps she was a parasite evolving to blight any budding emotion that could blossom into rebellion. Something to keep him docile.

Her response was minimal to nonexistent as always. Perhaps she turned the slightest bit toward him, or maybe it was a twitch of his own sky-searching eye fooling him.

“I’m at a time where I need to take stock of who my allies are. And where threats lie.” Petals that weren’t there a moment ago gathered in his hand, converged, became heavy and rigid. “I will ask you one more time. What are you?”

He didn’t know if his scythe-point looming at the neck she grew last month posed a threat to her. If he was lucky, neither did she.

She drew nearer undaunted, porcelain-doll face fixed, but a certain determination in the growing proximity. Her response was earnest if soft-spoken: dead leaves blowing through yellow grass. She spoke of old decay, memory and form long de-composed and newly tilled by his mourning.

“But why me,” he pressed. “How are you connected to me?”

For that, she had no answer. For the first time in weeks he longed, almost ached for the very ghost before him, but the ache withered just as soon as it tried to sprout.

Marluxia had an inkling she was once a compatriot of his stripped-away self. Beyond that, she could have been a forgotten friend just as easily as an old enemy.

A certain selectively-loose-lipped senior member let slip that the other Keywielder, the one with a heart, had gone to the borderlands of the realm of darkness. No one knew if he would emerge, or when, or where. Marluxia danced a dance of feigned half-interest in the scraps Xigbar offered about “neutral zones” between the realms of light and darkness. Xemnas wanted Keyblades, that much everyone knew, but little was known to the lower ranks about these supposed neutral zones, nor how the Keywielder might move through them.

Xemnas granted Marluxia oversight of a castle and a Nobody with a particular sway over hearts. What a sorry state for the Nobody – able to bend hearts but not give herself one, able to dig through memories with none of her own. And the castle itself, able to recreate worlds from one’s memories, if only one had them. Marluxia bit back the urge to call it a cruel joke and accepted the promotion.

“We’re relocating,” he told his ghost.

He was accustomed to her silence, though she slowly tilted her head up to him curiously.

“You’re coming,” he also told her. She probably would have agreed to come if he asked, but wheels were turning now and he didn’t have time to gently probe for compliance. If she was truly an ally, permission was a needless formality, and if she was truly a threat, he would need her within reach to scatter her barely-held scraps of existence.

So he brought the maiden in white with him on his journey to the neutral zone. Among the curiosities of his new location, the castle’s thirteenth floor was an access point to the world between the realms of light and darkness. Marluxia took her there, where the castle ended and where the great void called. Neither light would burn her nor darkness smother her, but should she venture past the safety of the castle’s construction, the nothingness might tear her apart. Or it might preserve her perfectly, trap her forever in a prison without boundary.

When Marluxia turned his back to his ghost, he heard the dozen tiny snaps of delicate new roots tugged from the earth. It was the first time she spoke to him unprompted.

“Is there a problem?”

She couldn’t articulate herself beyond that, but she had followed the couple of paces he cleared toward the castle.

“You’ll be safe if you stay here, tucked away where the others won’t be able to harm you. Just as long as you don’t wander into the space between realms.”

Just as she had done when he first found her, a tiny hood on his bedroom floor, she curled her empty sleeves around his arm. How like her. Even in this state, ever trying to keep him at her side.

Where did that come from?

“The matter is not up for discussion." He didn't have time for wondering anymore. "I won’t tolerate disobedience in this castle, least of all from you.”

She kept her hold before his authority, but she didn’t defy him to follow any further when he turned away. As long as she stayed put here, she would be safe. Sequestered from prying eyes and the unpredictable Nobodies joining them.

He found the other maiden in white there in the castle. She was meek where his was stoic, her eyes bright and frightened where his kept her featureless, stolid stare.

“I am Marluxia, the keeper of this castle,” he told this unfamiliar maiden in white. “Obey me and you’ll have a chance at the companionship you long for. Refuse, and this castle will be sealed and abandoned with you in it.”

She was a smart girl and understood there was no room for negotiation or disobedience. She remained under Larxene’s watch whenever she wasn’t under his own. Marluxia let her witness Larxene’s cruelty, let her witness him stay silent or call Larxene to stand down so that she knew everything that happened to her was under his control. This chance to seize control of the self he lost was too important for anything less.

The Keywielder emerged. Wheels turned. A few times, Marluxia wondered if his specter would vanish in the midst of his plan’s success without his mourning to sustain her. Would he too become caught in the tale he spun for Sora – losing his ghost as he gathered the pieces to lock his rebellion into place?

He couldn’t worry about that now. Once he succeeded, when he cleared the path to completing Kingdom Hearts on his own terms, only then would he once again have the luxury of pondering her appearance. He could try to piece together her mystery once he had his own memories to draw from.

But his plan fell apart. He sent copies to find Naminé, to try to salvage the situation, but as each piece of the plan crumbled to dust in his hand one thought ran clear and true: he could not defeat Sora. If he couldn’t correct Naminé’s misbehavior now, he had no way to force the Keywielder into submission.

His specter waited at the top of the castle for his return throughout Sora’s return. Marluxia went up to see her in the midst of the chaos unfolding. To tell her goodbye? Or to dispose of her before she could let him down too?

He almost expected to find her missing. Perhaps she might have wandered out ito the void on her own after so long waiting, stored away like a tool in a shed. But when he entered that terminal balcony on the topmost floor, he found her waiting as she always did for his return. Beyond her, nothing, so much of it that it could rend them both if he took them out to it.

“My plan has failed.”

He couldn’t hide his despair from her, not when he could see it plain as day on her as he approached. She had a torso now, loomed as tall as Vexen had.

“I’ve lost control of Naminé. And Axel has fled. Larxene is no more. Sora’s emboldening Naminé’s disobedience. If only I could stop him, but.” On the other side of the balcony, a clone built of petals stalled for him. It was no doubt going to collapse under the onslaught of Sora's strength. He could already feel the seams of its creation beginning to tear. “But,” he repeated. “I cannot defeat Sora.”

She stared at him, no hint of a reaction visible. Belatedly, Marluxia recalled that he never saw fit to detail his plan to her. “Do you even know what I’m talking about?”

She still didn’t have an answer.

“It doesn't matter. I can’t go back to the Organization. I’m going to fade in this castle. So what will you do?”

If he pushed her hard enough, would she manage to move freely or be scattered into this purgatory? He preferred the latter. His pride held him from rushing into the void, but as for her. She was the last thing he had now, the last thing he had to lose. He’d sooner give her back to the void by his own hand than allow Sora to take her from him.

But she closed the distance between them, and the heavy fabric of her empty sleeves fell against his cheeks. When she spoke, her voice was made of hardened dry thorns. It was a promise: of judgment, of execution. But promises were for those with hearts, and the snare of her words tightened around absent quarry.

Marluxia gave a hollow laugh. “Trying to put me out of my misery?”

She straightened, and already she was larger than she was moments before. Enough that Marluxia had to look up to meet her lifeless doll-gaze. Her attention moved to the door. Marluxia didn’t resist the smile tugging at his lips as she moved past him, still focused on what was coming for them.

“So my little ghost finally shows her true colors.” He commented, approaching her side. “What you just told me,” he continued, “allow me to pass the message on to Sora.”

The specter kept her place, unswayed by the offer.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Even with his heart tampered with, Sora is powerful.”

Her answer was a hundred bare trees rending furious wind into howls, into a rallying cry. On the other side of the door, Sora battered the last stitches of Marluxia’s copy into a burst of blossoms and stray darkness. Another nail in his coffin, the very armor forming over his specter. She was the last thing that could be taken from him, so he would mourn his hopes until he or Sora fell. Just as long as he didn’t outlive her.

But even this plan was being thwarted. She was sinking her roots into him. How thoughtless he had been not to notice it. She was the last thing that could be taken from him, but what did she have to take away?

He laughed at both their pitiful desperation. “You’re just as selfish as me.”

Her cold grasp reached throughout his being, mingled his despair with her own. He was already decaying rapidly. Was she going to try to absorb him completely to challenge Sora in his place?

No. Together this time.

Whose conviction was that?

Together this time, the shadow of death told him. Just this once.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are greatly appreciated!


End file.
